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24 Preludes and Fugues, Op 87

Recordings

A new recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, deeply original and enigmatic works—encompassing charming simplicity and dazzling virtuosity—whose style is perfectly captured by pianist Peter Donohoe.» More

'This magnificent set courageously undertaken by Hyperion, a timely document of an interpretation fashioned from Nikolayeva's collaboration with the c ...'The recording is clear and atmospheric, and the playing has power, grandeur, character, intellectual clarity and unforced intensity' (Gramophone)» More

Details

The opening Prelude and Fugue begins calmly, as a classical sarabande with overtly simple C major chords whose passing minor inflection in bar 7 soon passes, on repetition, to more distant tonal regions. The pull of C major is too strong, and indeed is reinforced as the noble Fugue unfolds. This is an extraordinary—if not astonishing—achievement in twentieth-century contrapuntal writing, for not one accidental appears, and the dynamic never rises above mezzo forte. In addition, the unified pulse of Prelude and Fugue achieves greater cohesion throughout this prefatory music.

The opening of this sublime and diverse set of pieces is already enigmatic. The prelude is based on a rhythmic figure consisting of quarter note, dotted quarter note, eighth note and two quarter notes in 3/4 time—reminiscent of a sarabande.

By comparison, the fugue—which is in four voices—is choral in style and beatific in mood. This is Shostakovich at his most spiritual, and is, perhaps more than any of the set, reminiscent of Bach—in particular, the mood of the Prelude and Fugue that occupies exactly the same position in Volume One of ‘The Forty-Eight’.

Keeping the same pulse as No 1, the A minor Prelude is a fluent, Bach-like, single-line study of running semi-quavers; the faster three-voice Fugue is a jaunty little piece, recalling the composer’s lighter polkas, with some rather salty tonal side-steps.

The prelude is a swift toccata—a perpetuum mobile of whirling sixteenth notes that seems to be an accompaniment without a melody. It is punctuated only at one point by a succession of long Es that threaten to become a melody, but disappear almost as soon as they arrive.

The fugue in three voices that follows, is a grotesque dance, with a subject in two sections—a baroque motif of two bars followed by a series of leaps of a seventh, leading to acerbic harmonic clashes. The keyboard writing is very demanding; the wide leaps and the clarity needed for this piece demand great finger strength.

A powerful octave theme, modulating to C major, is answered by a more nervous idea above sustained chords; eventually, the ideas combine, rendering G less stable. The home tonality, by way of the leading note, is safely restored by the dance-like Fugue which juxtaposes, within the middle-entry sections, the subject’s ascending semi­quaver scale (surprisingly, never inverted) and the trochaic 6/8 metre.

The prelude is declamatory, at first alternating between a strong unison phrase in the lower register and an almost plaintive single line in the treble, with insistent repeated notes a notable feature. Eventually the tessitura of the two characters is reversed, they are superimposed, and the unison phrase becomes a chorale The harmonies become increasingly dissonant, and the piece concludes with an unresolved suspension played fortissimo, over which pounds the repeated note figure.

Out of this rising tension catapults the energetic fugue—a wild piece in 6/8 time requiring brilliance of finger-work and clarity of texture. This virtuoso fugue in three voices is one of the most demanding of the whole cycle, and is again reminiscent of Hindemith, with its angular subject and displaced accents.

The secondary idea of the previous Prelude is here transformed into a subsidiary role for a beautiful theme which becomes more chromatic as the piece progresses. A double fugue ensues: as the first unfolds it implies substantial length but as it lights momentarily on B major a second fugue begins, Più mosso, which is eventually com­bined with the first. A powerfully extended double stretto leads to a resounding tierce de picardie at the end.

The sad prelude is built on drooping pairs of eighth notes, over which appears a sighing motif in long notes. The tonality is ambiguous in characteristic Shostakovich fashion, but E minor is rarely far away. Near the end an unexpected rising scale takes us into A-flat major for a moment of pure ecstasy and calm, after which the desolate E minor immediately returns.

The double fugue that follows is one of the three in the cycle that gradually builds from a quiet opening to a fortissimo final climax; the majority of the slower fugues climax in the middle, and return to their opening moods, whilst most of the quicker ones remain a static statement.

The flowing bass line of the Prelude, against soft arpeggiated chords (the roles are reversed, and then resumed), creates a serene atmosphere against which the playful Fugue subject (a difficult one for any contrapuntalist; even the counter-subject is closely related) comes as a breath of fresh, contrasting air.

In the prelude the ambiguous atmosphere—a mixture of simple rural charm and melancholy—is in sharp contrast to its predecessor. A folk-style melody is supported by continuous arpeggiated chords, suggesting a lute or some other simple folk instrument, in the treble. Meanwhile in the bass is an equally folky line, redolent of the sound of a cello.

The fugue has a simple construction, whose subject is in two parts—a repeated motif whose main characteristic is two groups of four repeated notes, and then a series of downward-falling pairs of repeated notes. In three voices, the work is one of the most lighthearted of the cycle, and has a mood of untarnished naïveté.

The double-dotted opening recalls those of the fifth and eighth Symphonies: in keyboard terms, the neo-classical outline rises to impressive climaxes. The more extended Fugue is concentrated upon the lower registers; the emotional tenor is held more in check, albeit with a final repeated dominant.

The powerful prelude in B minor is in the style of a Baroque French Overture, with its marcato double dotted rhythms. However, the harmonies are exclusively and strikingly Shostakovichian—in particular the chorale melody that appears after a few lines—reminiscent of certain of his symphonies. The piece dies away unexpectedly, as if suddenly all its energy has drained away, leaving the link to the fugue.

The pianissimo opening of the fugue in four voices grows out of the end of the prelude. The mood of this beautiful fugue is dark and foreboding, although there are some blissfully sunny moments and modulations to distant tonalities on the way.

This Prelude and Fugue is that of a light and delicate interior: the little Prelude moves over solitary long pedals, but the Fugue subject, based entirely on the notes of the major chord (legato sempre) is fleet of tempo and character, a gossamer texture as of an early morning in high summer.

A pastoral and naïve mood dominates the prelude. The music is in a lilting 12/8 time, and in an unusually simple tonal style. However, occasional strange harmonic turns indicate something disturbing underneath.

The fugue—in three voices—is based on a remarkable subject consisting entirely of the notes of a broken chord of A major. There is almost no chromaticism in this piece, and the harmonic variety comes from the—sometimes surprising—juxtaposition of blocks of tonal harmony, creating an impression of naïve wonderment.

The Prelude begins in a mood similar in character to that of the second Piano Sonata; busy semiquavers over an ostinato-like two-note figure; the magnificent Fugue is one of Shostakovich’s finest contrapuntal achievements, a splendid piece of sustained intensity and feeling.

One of the most significant of the cycle, the enormously moving fugue is preceded by an equally disturbing prelude. The style of both prelude and fugue is arrestingly Jewish. Although the prelude alone could be taken to be a fairly light-hearted dance, in the context of the fugue, it becomes a grotesque parody.

The fugue subject is extraordinary, consisting of two characters—a bar-long downward-looking phrase that is repeated, and returns in the eighth bar, and an upward leap of an augmented fourth that resolves onto the note one semitone below, giving the impression of a pained sigh. The enormous fugue in three voices that is built upon this series of motifs becomes increasingly chromatic and tortured.

The ninth Fugue is the only two-part one in the set: by contrast, the Prelude is a mood-picture of some intensity, with a low octave theme answered high in the treble—the whole perceived from afar, as a Mahlerian childhood reminiscence of distant barracks. The Fugue is a marvellous onward-moving two-part invention, foreshadowing the tenth Symphony’s (1953) finale.

With the tragic mood of its predecessor still in the air, the strikingly beautiful and questioning prelude in E major is as unexpected as it is ambiguous. Notated largely on four staves, it consists of a series of phrases alternating between the two extremes of the keyboard—mostly unharmonised and in unison two octaves apart.

The bubbly fugue that follows completely dispels any unease created by the prelude. This fugue is written in only two voices—the only one of the twenty four. Thus it has the sound of a Baroque two-part invention, but with Shostakovich’s unique twists of tonality, and a very thorough working-out of the fugue.

Technically, this piece is possibly the most Bach-like of the set: the Prelude has an air of early eighteenth-century keyboard writing, as in Hauptwerk imitation. The Fugue repays close study: the (tonal) Answer is at the 11th, with the first interval raised from a second to a third. Note also the extended dominant pedal, and the twenty-six-bar coda. A remarkable fugue indeed.

One of the most obviously Bachian ideas forms the basis of the prelude—the opening is a quote—almost certainly a conscious one—from that of No.7 in E-flat major of Volume One of ‘The Forty-Eight’. This passage alternates with chorale-type passages played in the lower registers.

The fugue is one of the most inspired. In three voices, it is in a moderate tempo, the atmosphere autumnal. Towards the end, over a dominant pedal-point, the music becomes particularly beautiful, rising to a lyrical climax which then falls away to the final phrase.

The nimble and delicate Prelude is like the opening of Shostakovich’s ninth Symphony—one can almost hear flutes answered by bassoons. The identical tempo spins over to the fast Fugue, with more premonitions of the tenth Symphony (scherzo and finale). Giddy slides to the flat supertonic (C major) delay the sudden B major end (akin to the sixth Symphony’s finale).

This prelude is Shostakovich typically clowning around with a folky melody, adding incongruous notes to an apparently predictable tune, rendering it unpredictable in the extreme. It is reminiscent of the finale of his Ninth Symphony. But whereas in the symphony the tune is transmogrified into a grotesque and monstrous version of itself later in the movement, here it disappears off at the end in a happy-go-lucky fashion.

The happy mood is interrupted by the fugue, which is designed to be in the same tempo and to emerge directly from the prelude. Amongst the most difficult to play of the whole cycle, it is a wild and whirling Hopak, reminiscent of the finale of the Tenth Symphony, with its hysterical virtuosity.

By now the composer’s technical expertise was in full flood. This Prelude is a superb Passacaglia—of which, in the past, Shostakovich had shown himself to be a great master (Trio No 2, the then-withheld Violin Concerto No 1), and was to do so in the future (Quartets 6 and 10, inter alia). The 5/4 Fugue is a tour de force of textural and intellectual rigour, made human by the deeply expressive closing bars—and a balm-like tierce de picardie.

The magnificent prelude has the form of a Passacaglia throughout. At its climax, one is reminded of one of Russia’s great Orthodox Cathedrals. As the piece dies away, a ghostly pre-echo of the fugue’s main subject is heard in the tenor, but nothing can prepare one for the avalanche of composer-virtuosity into which one is suddenly hurled.

The fugue in three voices is an extraordinary tour de force. It has an angular subject, the tempo is fast, and the time signature 5/4. The climax towards which the first section hurtles is characterised by harsh dissonance, fortissimo octaves in the bass and a feeling of forward movement. A pedal-point on the dominant is reached and a pianissimo reworking of the fugue begins. A ghostly memory of the earlier aggression progresses, and the fugue gradually dies away. The final cadence is exquisitely beautiful, with dissonances gradually becoming more and more concordant and spaced further apart. Volume One finishes, very unexpectedly, on a pianississimo chord of G sharp major.

The 13th Prelude contrasts greatly with the intensity of its predecessor; here, an intermittent, gently-rocking, trochaic pulse underlies the flowing melodic ideas. The long Fugue—the only five-voice example in the set—shows this composer at his most personal, deep in contemplative thought.

The second volume of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues opens with a prelude whose main quality is contented naïveté. A expressive sequence of arabesques in the treble, in varying and unpredictable time signatures, alternates with a series of calmly undulating chords.

The fugue is unique in this collection in that it is the only one written in five voices. Although this renders the writing very unpianistic, and its execution extremely arduous, it is one of the most profoundly beautiful piano works of the 20th Century. Marked Adagio, it is choral in style—reminiscent of the singing of Russian Orthodox Church choirs—and takes us through a remarkable tapestry of different tonalities.

The Prelude is notably similar in mood to the noble 14th Prelude of Shostakovich’s Op 34 (finely orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski). Sombrely Mussorgskian, the tension (if not the tonality) is lightened by the fluent Fugue—formally unusual, with no dominant stretto and with a diminuendo coda.

After the sublime beauty and serene calm of the F sharp major, the intense sadness and overwhelming dark foreboding of this prelude comes as a shock. A fortissimo tremolo begins the work. This dies down to what turns out to be hugely taxing on the performer, as the tremolo is the first of many that underlie almost the whole piece, and thus continues for an enormously long time. The melody line eventually builds in dynamic, reaching a desperate climax, before subsiding to a brief moment of uneasy calm. The music remains uneasy and extremely sad, but now without the incessant and oppressive tremolos that help to make this piece, along with Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata, one of the most pessimistic and menacing piano works ever penned.

The fugue is again in total contrast. Although the sadness set up by the prelude does not evaporate, its threatening nature has disappeared. Instead, the fugue is a grey, autumnal dance in a moderately quick 3/4 time.

A typically fast Shostakovich waltz forms the Prelude; urgently bustling, it leads directly to the astonishing Fugue, fiery, hot-headed, and fiercely chromatic—the subject is an 11-note row, made more fearsome for the player by constant changes of time-signature.

The prelude is uninhibitedly in the style of a rustic folk dance. It is somewhat reminiscent of the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, whose position in between one of Shostakovich’s most significant movements (the first) and one of profound lament (the third) gives it a context that makes it seem a snarlingly sarcastic parody.

The latter plunges the listener very suddenly into a world of unequal bar lengths: the fugue subject itself consists of three bars of 3/4, one of 4/4, one more of 3/4, and one of 5/4, which renders it inevitable that the whole fugue is a nightmarish and exhausting avalanche of unpredictable rhythms. It is at the same time amusing, questioning, sarcastic and deliberately incongruous; perhaps it could be said that it is the opposite form of incongruousness to that of the ending of Mozart’s Musical Joke, or Charles Ives’ Second Symphony, in which tonal music has a deliberately wrong chord at the end—here we have atonal music that has a surprise tonal ending.

The intensity of the preceding pieces is lightened and varied by reflective music in which the tonality never varies. Utterly at ease, the Prelude is a miniature set of four variations; the extraordinary Fugue subject with its florid ornamentation creates a calm structure of classical elegance.

According to Tatiana Nicolayeva, the B-flat Minor prelude is the only one of the forty eight pieces that make up this cycle about which Shostakovich had second thoughts. The original composition had been very different, and the composer decided later to create a piece using the model of a Mozartian set of variations. His rethinking would not seem atypical of most composers’ ways of working. That he untypically had second thoughts over this prelude is significant only because the composer was perhaps searching for the perfect way to introduce the strangest of all the fugues.

The form of the prelude is indeed similar to that of a set of variations written by Mozart. However, the style of the music is very typical of Shostakovich, and very Russian in the dark, choral style of its opening theme. There are three variations upon this theme, after which a coda introduces new harmonies. The music slows and becomes even darker, with the last phrase intoned in the bottom octave of the piano, preparing the way for the mood of the fugue.

Along with the final fugue in D minor, the B-flat minor is the most extended of the cycle. In the former case, its length is determined by an extended coda to the whole cycle after the music has ceased to be fugal. In this case, however, it is the extreme length of the subject and the tempo of the piece that causes its duration.

The Prelude is tripartite, with each section itself in three parts. Such formal planning implies an even more closely-worked Fugue than usual, as is indeed demanded by the unique 5/4 20-note subject, with the Tonal answer a fourth below. The result is perhaps the most ‘academic’ fugue of the set.

This prelude returns to the rustic character of the preludes in D major and D flat major, although here the music has a more unquestioning quality. The melancholy of the D major and the sarcasm of the D flat major are both mostly absent here. Instead, a pastoral melody line is accompanied by a simple ostinato, reminiscent of the sound of an organ grinder. The ending is almost bluesy—strikingly reminiscent of 1950s American jazz.

The fugue, rather than being in contrast to the prelude, as characterises most of these works, seems to continue the same mood. It has a rustic dance flavour to it, even though it is in a 5/4 time signature throughout, and later becomes extremely complex pianistically. It has, probably coincidentally, a style suggestive of English country dance; the ghost of Percy Grainger seems to hover above the piece, with its witty harmonic twists and turns.

The Prelude is a soberly-paced study in adjacent falling tonalities: until D major is reached, the dominant of which—A—implies the major mode of F minor. Probably using the Opus 34 F minor Prelude as the source, the Fugue subject—firmly in F minor, the Tonal answer a fourth below—is worked according to its own Prelude’s tonal scheme, with the final mode ambiguous.

A beautiful melody line opens the prelude, tinged with a longing sadness. The pitch gradually descends towards the bass. Unexpectedly, the mood is transformed as the key changes to the distant one of D major, the tempo becomes Adagio, and an ecstatic moment, represented by very simple slow-moving chords is an unexpected as it is brief.

The fugue is based on a singing and simple subject, from which the rhythm of a quarter note followed by two eighth notes becomes the dominant force of its later development. As always, the fugue, in three voices, passes through many other keys. Again there is a suggestion of a conflict between minor and major during the final bars, created by the music hovering between F major and A flat. The final resolution in F major is like an echo of the same uneasy calm that concluded the prelude.

A noble chorale, tagged by a nervous idea with E flat’s tritone A natural, begins the Prelude which, in slow degrees, ebbs away—until the Fugue, destabilised by the tritone, angular and chromatically pulled to the flat supertonic, at last eludes these tonal impurities by a simple cadence.

The suspended unease comes with the end of this prelude. It results from the progress of the majestic chorale that opens it, as it alternates several times with a nervous and tonally ambiguous passage of short chords. The fugue, in three voices, that follows is perhaps the most unapproachable of the twenty four from the first-time listener’s point of view. However, it is a very fine example of the form, and, in the final bars, after the fugue’s strangeness has been fully worked out, there is a curiously satisfying and surprisingly gentle resolution onto the tonic.

Listeners’ difficulty on first hearing stems from its consistent 5/4 time combined with a modal subject that, although revolving around the tonic E flat pitch, is chromatic to the degree that it is almost atonal. The complex harmonies are particularly highlighted by the mostly legato and lyrical phrasing required by the composer. Thus the whole fugue is a mêlée of strange contrapuntal but lyrical lines and acerbic harmonies—that is, until the coda, in which the harmony is resolved in a way that at least implies a diatonic solution.

The C minor Prelude, emotionally and formally not unlike the E flat major, begins with a traditional theme stated at two octaves’ distance: the answering phrase has the new tritone—F sharp—as a passing-note. No doubt unwittingly, bars 46 and 47 contain DSCH (the composer’s musical initials), but C major is the arbiter. Uniquely in this set the Fugue subject begins with the identical four notes of the opening of the Prelude, and follows a similar tonal plan.

The prelude is very ponderous and atmospheric. The opening phrase is dark and mysterious. The line of notes later becomes the subject of the fugue. It is answered by a lonely voice in the treble. This contrast is repeated several times over—the immediately obvious similarity to many of the composer’s symphonic slow movements is compounded with each phrase.

The beautiful fugue in four voices is one of the greatest of the cycle. The simple subject—a derivative of the first bar of the prelude—is itself modal. Again the atmosphere is one of quiet melancholia, its major key episodes especially radiant in contrast. The augmentation of the fugal writing that occurs in the latter half is particularly poignant, as is the use of pedal point. However, the hushed serene beauty of the C major coda, where Shostakovich uses the major key material to resolve the tonality, is perhaps the most poignant moment of all.

This Prelude, a tricky study in running semiquavers, encompasses the bass register before rising to the top of the keyboard. The jaunty and dance-like Fugue subject spawns highly unusual treatment and texture, with irregular bar lengths and—in the Exposition—Answers which are neither Real nor, strictly speaking, Tonal. The angular subject perhaps demands this treatment; the result is a fugue of enormous originality and fascination.

The prelude is a tour de force. Its relentless sixteenth notes in the treble are accompanied for the most part by continuous quarter notes in the bass. It could be taken as an étude for the right hand, given that at no point does the left hand take over the semi quavers; Chopin and Liszt would undoubtedly have reversed the roles of the hands at some point. The predominant mood is one of humour throughout, and after several modulations into distant keys, the piece snuffs itself out like a light.

The fugue in three voices begins lightly, in the style of a quick 3/4 dance. The mood is bright, the harmonies angular—with a hint of Hindemith—and the gradual increase in tension very exciting. The piece ends in a very boisterous orchestral style, with an extended hemiola on the final cadence.

The running semiquavers of Prelude 21 are here subsumed into flowing quavers, forming a beautifully lyrical piece of free-ranging plasticity. The Fugue returns somewhat to normalcy. The subject is in the alto, with the soprano Tonal Answer at the fifth; the subject again in the bass, the Answer in the tenor. The stage is now set for extended contrapuntal treatment.

This prelude is a beautiful but sad—almost mournful—piece, based almost entirely on Shostakovich’s characteristic and expressive slurred pairs of notes, reminiscent of the earlier prelude in E minor (No 4 of the cycle).

The fugue is in three voices, and is another of Shostakovich’s autumnal and deliberately suspenseful statements. Vocal in style, the subject has a harmonic simplicity that make parts of it sound as if they could be from any period of music. The work remains in the minor key at the end, and the whole impression of both prelude and fugue is one of suspenseful irresolution—a refusal to answer the intangible questions posed by itself.

The Prelude’s full texture hints at Bach’s ‘Italian Concerto’, although the language and manner are fully Shostakovich’s. The fabric also hints at his Piano Sonata No 2 and fragmentary quotations from earlier Preludes; as with Fugue 22, the tonal basis of this Fugue is strong. It is as though, nearing the end of his vast project the composer returned to basic harmonic truths as this extended lyrical fugue weaves a fascinating, undulating tapestry.

This prelude constitutes one of Shostakovich’s most profoundly romantic and moving creations. The influence of Mahler—particularly the famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony and the finale of the Ninth—is immediately obvious from the yearning turn that appears in the melody of the first phrase to the unexpected melting modulations and the beautiful harmony of the final few bars. It has an atmosphere of calmness and serene beauty that completely belies any ambiguity suggested by earlier works in the cycle.

In contrast with the prelude, the F major fugue is lyrical, leisurely and amiable. Its position as the penultimate fugue in the cycle of twenty four gives it a special significance that it seems at first unwilling to adopt. However, if one views it as the successor to a particularly open-hearted and nostalgic prelude, and the predecessor to the uniquely powerful final prelude and fugue, its static nature takes on a logical significance in the grand scale of the cycle as a whole.

With this, Shostakovich’s final Prelude and Fugue, the composer reaches the apogee of his task. D minor is resolutely established, impressively so by bars 30 and 31 in sombre deep octaves, from which profound region a simple theme, maestoso, appears. This comes to permeate the music, which, against an E pedal, recapitulates the opening idea—pianissimo. The simple theme is revealed both as the final arbiter of the Prelude and as the subject of the Fugue. As with the opening C major Fugue, not one accidental appears in the first sixty bars of this Fugue—all four voices have fully stated the Exposition—and the tonality, so comprehensively settled, is now used as the starting-point for Shostakovich’s most expansive and conclusive fugue, growing in cumulative kinetic power and ending in defiant triumph.

Three months after this massive work was completed, it was heard as a whole at the Soviet Union of Composers in Moscow, in April and May 1951. But the first public performance was not given until December 1952, spread over the evenings of the 23rd and 28th, in the small Glinka Hall in Leningrad. The artist on that occasion, chosen by the composer and rehearsed by him, was Tatiana Nikolayeva.

The D minor is the climax, not only of this magnificent cycle of preludes and fugues, but perhaps of the whole of Shostakovich’s piano works. The slow declamatory majesty of the opening of the prelude rises like a monolith from the apparently calculated stasis of the preceding fugue in F major. After a few bars the tension increases even more and a crisis is reached with three fortissimo bars. After the music subsides, an heroic theme in G major sounds; this has the character of a military memorial eulogy played on a distant trumpet, and will later become the subject of the fugue.

The final work in this cycle is in two sections. The first is a quiet fully worked-out fugue—complete in its own right, built from the pianissimo trumpet tune that appears after the first statement of the prelude. A succession of continuous eighth notes heralds the beginning of the second part of this enormous piece. The eighth notes that create the forward movement towards the coda are again in pairs, similar to those of the Preludes in E minor (No 4) and G minor (No 22), giving the music a similarly yearning character. Again, the mood of the first movement of the composer’s own Tenth Symphony is here evoked. From here onwards, the music is not fugal at all, but constitutes a coda to the whole cycle. Gradually the tension increases until, out of an avalanche of octaves in the key of C minor, the tonality shifts suddenly to a triumphant D major, and the majestic trumpet tune of the fugue subject blares out. This ‘triumphant moment’ is one of only two occasions on which the dynamic level of ‘fortississimo’ is used in the cycle of twenty four preludes and fugues—the other being at the end.